All this talk that voting against the remuneration report and/or re-election of Geoff Hiller will lead to the demise of APG is a red herring. Such a vote does not impact the company in anyway, though it might impact Mr Hiller, he is the only person shareholders can “throw out”.
At the 2021 AGM the remuneration report was supported so there was no first strike. Even if the required number of shareholders at the 2022 AGM vote against the remuneration report, this will be a first strike and will not lead to a spill meeting, so the board is not at risk.
Also there is no impediment to re-listing since the suspension is voluntary, and not instituted by the ASX. Austpac can simply answer the ASX’s questions and we go from there. Instead the directors have denied shareholders the only chance they might have had to sell their shares and recoup some money, though I doubt there would have been a market for APG shares anyway.
Shareholders do not hold the future of the company in our collective hands, the future of the company is in the hands of Kore Management (ie Terry Cuthbertson). On 31 December 2022 APG must repay Kore $200,000 plus interest. The September 2022 quarterly shows APG has $45000 left to drawdown in the loans from Kore plus $31000 cash and cash equivalents. They have no hope of repaying the loan so will likely default.
The question is what will Kore do, the logical choice seems to me to be to force APG into liquidation and recover what they can from asset sales and gain access to Austpac’s intellectual property, which, as none of the IP is patented, can’t be worth muchhttp://pericles.ipaustralia.gov.au/ols/auspat/jumpToPage.do?searchID=eyJxdWVyeSI6ImF1c3RwYWMiLCJzZWFyY2hNb2RlIjoiUVVJQ0tfTk9fQUJTVFJBQ1QiLCJwYWdlU2l6ZSI6MTAsInBhZ2VOdW1iZXIiOjAsInNvcnQiOnsiZmllbGQiOiJBUFBMSUNBVElPTl9OVU1CRVIiLCJkaXJlY3Rpb24iOiJERVNDIn19&pageNavigation=prev&resultsPerPage=10&firstRecordNo=11&lastRecordNo=16&resultsCount=16¤tPageNo=2&callingAction=quickSearch.
As the saying goes “those that ignore history are bound to repeat it”. Ignoring the history of Austpac simply means we will end up in the same sinking boat we’ve been bailing out for 30 years.
